Impressive!

I'm new to Arch but not new to Linux. My notebook decided to take a dump and I've been fighting ever since to find a good distro to use.

I think I found it with Arch. I'm quite impressed.

I do have a couple of problems that I hope will be easy to resolve. The fonts aren't the best but I think I saw a topic on fonts here somewhere so I will look that up.

The bigger issue is 1) sound -- each time I reboot my sound is muted and PCM is turned down and muted. I have to run alsamixer to turn everything up. I have done an alsactl store to save my settings but they don't seem to be getting set on reboot.2) I'm running on a notebook and I want to compile a custom kernel with CPU freq and ACPI. Is there a particular way I should do this or just download from kernel.org?

Re: Impressive!

2)cpufreq is built into the standard kernel26 package, all you need are the proper modules loaded. on a centrino chipset use speedstep-centrino and cpufreq-userspace. then install powernowd and add it to DAEMONS=() in rc.conf. that should be the easiest. in any case, it should not be necessary to build your own kernel, instead probe modules according to your machine and use either cpufreq-<governour>, cpufreqd or powernowd

good luck!

I recognize that while theory and practice are, in theory, the same, they are, in practice, different. -Mark Mitchell

Re: Impressive!

If you looked at alsa rc script, you'd see that this actually isn't a daemon (i.e. it doesn't stay running in background). It just restores the volume settings on start (i.e. boot) and saves them on stop (i.e. shutdown).

Re: Impressive!

The alsa daemon is not really a deamon like the cron daemon wich is continually running in the background. On boot up, the alsa daemon runs:
alsactl restore
to restore the sound levels and then quits. At shutdown, it runs:
alsactl store
to store the sound levels. The use of the daemon format here is to make it more user-friendly than having the user place these commands in the correct initscript files.

Re: Impressive!

Hey Cub69! Welcome to Arch! I've been using it solely for over a year now and it fits like a glove I have some recommendations for your fonts issue. I got used to those sharp fonts in Windows so here are some of my experience about a way to have something similar in Arch, too:

- in Firefox:1) modify userChrome.css (in your .mozilla/firefox/something.default/chrome) and see you have something like this:

* {
font-size: 9pt !important;
font-family: Helvetica !important;
}

- make sure you have helvetica there. This fixes the menus font.2) set all the fonts at Edit->Preferences->Content->Fonts&Colors->Advanced to helvetica, too. This made in my case all the webpages look nice and readable.

- in Thunderbird (your .thunderbird/something.default)1) there you can also make the chrome dir and userChrome.css in there and then add the same font settings to there as to Firefox to fix the menus. I had to set the font-size to 15 instead of 9 for the menu fonts to look the same as in Firefox.2) in preferences select again the helvetica fonts

- in window managersI am using only KDE and in there I have set all the fonts to smoothansi. It is in artwiz-fonts package. For a short time I have tried Gnome/Xfce - helvetica looks great - Gnome/Xfce somehow renders helvetica differently than KDE. EDIT: I tried helvetica in KDE and fonts seemed too wide apart from each other and thus were hard to read - that is the reason why I soon switched back to smoothansi again.

- consolesI use only Konsole and there I have selected Fixed [Misc]. It seems to be in my case most readable and all the proportions are right.